Guest Editors:
Robert Kofler, PhD, Institut für Populationsgenetik, Vetmeduni Vienna, Austria
Miriam K. Konkel, MD, Center for Human Genetics, Clemson University, USA
Leandro Quadrana, PhD, CNRS, University of Paris-Saclay, France
Jürgen Schmitz, PD PhD, Institute of Experimental Pathology, University of Münster, Germany
Genome Biology called for submissions to our Collection on transposons and related genetic elements and their role in shaping genome evolution.
Robert Kofler, PhD, Institut für Populationsgenetik, Vetmeduni Vienna, Austria
Robert studied agriculture and obtained a PhD in molecular plant breeding. He is currently Group leader at the Vetmeduni Vienna. Robert first came into contact with transposable elements (TEs) during his doctoral work, but as a source of frustration rather than a research focus, as TEs thwarted his efforts to develop molecular markers for the highly repetitive rye genome. Soon this frustration turned into a passion. Robert is now fascinated by the evolutionary conflict between TEs and their hosts and how this interaction shapes species genomes.
Miriam K. Konkel, MD, Center for Human Genetics, Clemson University, USA
Miriam studied medicine at the Charité in Berlin, Germany and received her medical degree from the Humboldt University. She began investigating transposable elements during her postdoc in Dr Batzer’s group at Louisiana State University. She is currently a group leader at Clemson University in South Carolina where she studies the evolution of transposable elements as well as the impact of transposable elements on genomes at the DNA and RNA level. She has performed mobilome and phylogenetic analyses for a number of genome projects and is a contributing member of the Human Genome Structural Variation and the Telomere-to-Telomere Primate consortia.
Leandro Quadrana, PhD, CNRS, University of Paris-Saclay, France
Leandro received his PhD in Biology from the University of Buenos Aires, Argentina. His research focuses on understanding how genetic diversity within species is shaped, particularly looking at the role of transposable elements and their regulation. Using recent advancements in population genomics, he has explored how these genetic elements vary in different plant species and their effects. Currently, he leads the Quantitative Genomics and Epigenomics team at the University of Paris-Saclay, France, where they study how genetic and epigenetic factors influence transposition activity in nature and their implications for the adaptation of plants to drastic environmental changes.
Jürgen Schmitz, PD PhD, Institute of Experimental Pathology, University of Münster, Germany
Jürgen Schmitz received his PhD in evolutionary zoology on social insects in 1997 at the University of Berlin. For five years, he led a primate genetics and evolution group at the German Primate Center in Göttingen and established retrotransposons as molecular markers. In 2003, he moved to the University of Münster as a group leader in the evolution of mammalian small RNAs, exonization of transposons, and retrotransposons as significant phylogenetic markers. He contributed to many vertebrate genome sequencing projects. His group developed user-friendly bioinformatic tools to screen and analyze genomes for evolutionary diagnostic transposons, statistics, and parallelized selection analyses.
Genome Biology is calling for submissions to our Collection on transposons and related genetic elements and their role in shaping genome evolution.
Transposable elements have emerged as integral contributors to genomic diversity, adaptation, and evolution. Their mobility shapes the architecture of genomes, influencing gene regulation, genome size, and ultimately, the phenotypic variability within populations. Unraveling the dynamics of transposons provides insights into the evolutionary forces governing the development and adaptation of organisms over time.
This collection aims to showcase the latest research on the role of transposons and related genetic elements in shaping genome evolution. Topics accepted for submission include, but are not limited to, the following:
Image provided by Guest Editor Jürgen Schmitz.
Sex-biased gene regulation is the basis of sexual dimorphism in phenotypes and has been studied across different cell types and different developmental stages. However, sex-biased expression of transposable el...
Transposable element (TE) expansion has long been known to mediate genome evolution and phenotypic diversity in organisms, but its impact on the evolution of post-transcriptional regulation following species d...
Mobilization of transposable elements (TEs) can generate large effect mutations. However, due to the difficulty of detecting new TE insertions in genomes and the typically rare occurrence of transposition, the...
Less than 0.5% of people living with HIV-1 are elite controllers (ECs)—individuals who maintain undetectable plasma viremia without antiretroviral therapy, despite having replication-competent viral reservoirs...
East African cichlid fishes have diversified in an explosive fashion, but the (epi)genetic basis of the phenotypic diversity of these fishes remains largely unknown. Although transposable elements (TEs) have b...
The DNA/H3K9 methylation and Polycomb-group proteins (PcG)-H3K27me3 silencing pathways have long been considered mutually exclusive and specific to transposable elements (TEs) and genes, respectively in mammal...
We present GenomeDelta, a novel tool for identifying sample-specific sequences, such as recent transposable element (TE) invasions, without requiring a repeat library. GenomeDelta compares high-quality assembl...
Centromeres depend on chromatin containing the conserved histone H3 variant CENP-A for function and inheritance, while the role of centromeric DNA repeats remains unclear. Retroelements are prevalent at centro...
This Collection welcomes submission of original Research, Method, Short Report, Review, and Database article types. Before submitting your manuscript, please ensure you have read our submission guidelines.
To submit your manuscript to this Collection, please use our online submission system and indicate in your covering letter that you would like the article to be considered for inclusion in the "Transposable elements in genome evolution" Collection.
All articles submitted to Collections are peer reviewed in line with the journal’s standard peer review policy and are subject to all of the journal’s standard editorial and publishing policies. This includes the journal’s policy on competing interests.
The Guest Editors have no competing interests with the submissions which they handle through the peer review process. The peer review of any submissions for which the Guest Editors have competing interests is handled by another Editor or Editorial Board Member who has no competing interests.